Workshop 3

Chair: Magali Haas

Speakers: Robert McBurney, Phil DeJager, James Heywood, Iya Khalil,  and Stephen Larson

Orion Bionetworks is a unique collaborative partnership that leverages the value of disease-area expertise, high-quality data and computational modeling to transform our understanding of diseases and accelerate the search for cures. Our initial effort focuses on multiple sclerosis and includes alliance partners from leading organizations in patient care, computational modeling, translational research, and patient advocacy.

Orion Bionetworks is creating a framework for integrating diverse high-dimensional genomic, proteomic, and phenotypic data to foster the development of multi-scale computational bio-informatics models using highly parallel supercomputing, machine learning and simulation. Disease models will be iterativley refined, validated, and improved through prospective collection of refined phenotypic and molecular datasets through networks of patient-driven and academic bio-repositories and registries.

Creation of predictive causal disease models in an open-science model may fundamentally change how researchers study and discover new treatments for MS, as well as inform how clinicians and their patients make treatment decisions. Further, we anticipate that our work in MS will serve as a “case study” for other endeavors that seek a deeper understanding of complex human biological systems and disease modalities.

Session: Thursday, August 29th 10:20-12:10